Stop struggling with reverb and start choosing the right space for your mix

Using reverb can get pretty challenging.

Not too much and it’ll sound dry and unpolished.

Too much and it’ll be a cluttered mess.

You can use reverb for contrast between verse and chorus as well as how you can use reverb to create two completely different mixes for the same song.

Reverb For Contrast

In one of the songs I basically mixed two different songs within the same session.

The verse drums had a completely different sound: Heavy reverb, floaty, crisp with the cymbals.

The chorus was tight: Parallel compression, small drum rooms, punchy.

The same went with the bass. In the verses I used the same plug-ins: Amp simulator, EQ, Rbass, but with totally different settings to suit the sound I was after.

The guitars were even more extreme. I used sparse processing on the verses because it already sounded pretty good. Just some EQ and compression along with some tape saturation. And best of all the Kramer tape plug-in has a built-in echo/delay effect so I just dialed in a little bit of delay to put the solo guitars in its space and voilá.

But the chorus guitars were routed, subgrouped, saturated and parallel distorted. It was edgy while still keeping it within the type of sound I was looking for. The guitars just sounded a bit too clean overall and to create that drastic contrast it’s always good to resort to some saturation.

Reverb For Style

In the second video I talked about how I used the arrangement and reverb to create different feels to the song.

Because, the arrangement is a fun one to play with because it has both acoustic guitar, pianos, pads and strings.

And depending on your perspective, you can take the song in multiple directions.

If you want to emphasize the singer/songwriter style of the song you can accent the acoustic guitar and create a “folkier” mix.

But if you want to create a big, orchestral arrangement you can really bring the pads, violins and piano to the forefront to create something much bigger.

But it’s not just pulling the faders of the instruments up that create a mix.

You have to create spaces around these instruments that make sense.

You can’t have big string pads and violins sounding like they’re being played in a garage.

And you can’t throw a cathedral style reverb on a rhythm acoustic guitar. It’ll just clutter up the mix.

So I went through some ways you can use reverb and spaces (in addition to balancing the faders) to create different mix styles.

Just by emphasizing different aspects of the mix and using different reverbs you end up with two completely different sounding mixes.

Learn EQ

Making a solid mix requires an understanding of not just reverb, but EQ also. You can get my free guide to EQ’ing mixes, with over 70 hacks to improve your tracks.

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